The present invention relates to content management in general and more particularly to methods and apparatus for associating user behavior with content relevant to the user behavior to present the user with the relevant content.
In a typical content-management system, a user makes a request for base content and receives the base content with additional content that may or may not be relevant to the user. Base content might include a web page the user visits and might be served to a user's client system in a set of search results provided by a search engine. Additional content might include advertisements or the like that are placed on the visited web page by advertisement server or the like. The additional content is often displayed on the visited page in a banner ad that includes a link to the advertiser's Web site.
Content-management systems configured to server base content and additional content are in common use. One common content-management system in use today is referred to as the Internet, a global internetwork of networks, wherein nodes of the network send requests to other nodes that might respond with the base content requested by a user along with additional content. One protocol usable for content-management systems is the Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP), wherein an HTTP client, such as a browser, makes a request for base content referenced by a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and an HTTP server responds to the requests by sending content specified by the URL. Of course, while this is a very common example, content retrieval is not so limited.
For example, networks other than the Internet might be used, such as a token ring, a WAP (wireless application protocol) network, an overlay network, a point-to-point network, proprietary networks, etc. Protocols other than HTTP might be used to request and transport content, such as SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), FTP (File Transfer Protocol), etc., and content might be specified by other than URLs. Portions of the present invention are described with reference to the Internet, a global internetwork of networks in common usage today for a variety of applications, but it should be understood that references to the Internet can be substituted with references to variations of the basic concept of the Internet (e.g., intranets, virtual private networks, enclosed TCP/IP networks, etc.) as well as other forms of networks. It should also be understood that the present invention might operate entirely within one computer or one collection of computers, thus obviating the need for a network.
Requested base content and relevant content could be in many forms. For example, some content might be text, images, video, audio, animation, program code, data structures, formatted text, etc. The base content and relevant content might be served on a web page, and may be formatted according any one of a number of network page protocols, such as the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the Extensible Markup Language (XML), the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) or other language in use at the time.
HTML is a common format used for pages or other content that is supplied from an HTTP server. HTML-formatted content might include links to other HTML content and a collection of content that references other content might be thought of as a document web, hence the name “World Wide Web” or “WWW” given to one example of a collection of HTML-formatted content. As that is a well-known construct, it is used in many examples herein, but it should be understood that unless otherwise specified, the concepts described by these examples are not limited to the WWW, HTML, HTTP, the Internet, etc.
A supplier of base content might determine the subject of the base content and/or a user's interests, and provide additional content that is relevant to the base content and or the user's interests. In determining relevant content, the base content provider may maximize a profit, for example, by supplying ads that the user may have an interest in and collecting fees from the advertiser for displaying the advertiser's ads. It is a continuing, expensive problem to correctly determine content that is relevant to a user. One approach to determining and providing content that is relevant to a user is to manually create predefined associations between a user profile of the user and the relevant content. Typically, predetermined associations are manually generated by a person who reads through content and the user profile to determine relevant associations therefor. This approach to generating associations between users and relevant content includes numerous problems in that users are often reluctant and resistant to provide personal information, users fear that his or her personal information may be shared (or sold) with those who may unscrupulously use the personal information. Even when users do provide personal information, the information only provides a static glimpse of a user interests. The information generally does not evolve with a user's changing interests, except possibly through the burdensome task (burdensome on both an information requester and on the user) of periodically requesting and providing new personal.
Another often used approach, which is often fraught with inaccuracy, for associating relevant content with a user is the use demographic information that targets the users. While demographic targeting might provide generalized information that is somewhat relevant, the information might not be sufficiently narrow for targeted advertising specific to individuals in the user's demographic. Just like a user supplied profile, demographic information suffers the fate of becoming stale once a demographic study is completed as the generated demographic data generally does not evolve as a user's interest changes. Such is especially for interests that change on a day-to-day basis or even on an hour-to-hour basis.
What is needed is an improved content-management system for generating a user profile that stays current with a user's evolving interests, and associates the interests with relevant content that is provided to the user in a timely manner.